Semantic Singularity…
DISAMBIGUATION – When I first ran across this word at Wikipedia I thought it must have something to do with disarming the White House of WMDs. But I followed the helpful link provided to find Wikipedia’s “more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know” article about disambiguation, which starts:
Disambiguation in Wikipedia and Wikimedia is the process of resolving ambiguity — meaning the conflict that occurs when a term is closely associated with two or more different topics. (In many cases, this word or phrase is the “natural” title of more than one article.) In other words, disambiguations are types of turnpikes that lead to different topics which share the same term or a similar term.
Wikipedia thrives on the fact that making links is simple and automatic: as you’re typing in an edit window, put (double square) brackets around Mercury and you’ll have a link. But were you intending to link to Mercury the element, the planet, the automobile brand, the record label, the NASA manned-spaceflight project, or the Roman god?
Disambiguation should not be confused with the merging of duplicate articles (articles with different titles, but regarding the very same topic, for example “Gas Turbine” and “Gas turbine”, or “loo” and “restroom”).
The clearest and most concise definition was found at dictionary.com:
disambiguation
n : clarification that follows from the removal of ambiguity
Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University
Yeah, OK, that clears it up for me…
2 Comments so far
Soooo, what we need is more disambiguation in the White House, not less. Or, maybe we really don’t want to know and are happy living un-disambiguated.
OK, I’m tired now.
Mary B made me laugh out loud.
I suppose we live in a society that is so complex we need double negative connotations in a single word.